Julianne, Renée... they're all just so much window dressing

Tonight at the Oscars don't let the ecstatic performances of a handful of super-glamorous Hollywood actresses pull the wool over your eyes. Take a close look at the list of nominations and you will get an all too familiar picture of the state of gender inequality in the movie business today.

Out of a total 182 nominees, 152 are men and 30 are women. Of these 30, 10 automatically go to best actress and best supporting actress. (An example of positive discrimination if you like.) The enormous power of these divas is largely responsible for the illusion of equality - they know better than anyone how to appear larger than life and claim the centre stage. But where are the creative women behind the scenes? Best Picture; all five are produced by men. Best Director: also the usual line-up of five men. Surely writing is an area where creative women traditionally excel? But only one of the five Best Original Screenplay nominees is female - Nia Vardalos for My Big Fat Greek Wedding. All the adaptation nominations go to men. There's the usual tiny smattering of women in the documentary and animation categories. No women composers, although one woman has been nominated for Best Song. There's one woman editor - used to be that women entering the film industry were automatically pointed in the direction of the cutting rooms. As usual the nominations in the technical areas - cinematography, sound and special effects - go to men.

Even in the categories for what might be considered traditional women's work we find only two have been nominated for make-up, although all five costume nominations are women - hooray, at last a cause for celebration. The only encouraging statistic, at least for European women, is that two of the best foreign language films nominated were written and directed by women: Paula van der Oest, who is Dutch (Zus & Zo) and Carolina Link, a German (Nirgendwo in Afrika).

So, does it matter that the film industry continues to be male-dominated? After all, some of the most notable films nominated are about women. Or is this, like the shimmering personas of their stars on the podium, also part of the illusion Hollywood likes to project of female equality and power?

Chicago, starring Renée Zellweger, portrays an entire chorus line of beautiful psychopaths who all murdered as a result of thwarted ambition and jealous pique. The message espoused by the film is that the criminal justice system is just a branch of show business where wicked lawyers and wild women will do anything, and I mean anything, for money and a place in the spotlight. Their main aim in life is the supreme pleasure to be gained from performing raunchy dance routines. Let's not be spoilsports by pointing out that most women in prison for murder are themselves victims of violent abusive male partners. The film is only a musical.

OK, so Cabaret managed to be a brilliant musical and give its audiences a real insight into the beginnings of Nazism in Thirties Berlin, whereas Chicago is for airheads. But boy, if women can dance like that they must be tough, liberated cookies, mustn't they?

If you think the idea that Chicago is a film about women is laughable, maybe The Hours, as a serious art-movie, will redress the balance. The three women in The Hours are certainly given a lot of screen time. But if we look more carefully we find that the emotional disturbance at the core of the story lies with the male characters who are abandoned by women. Leonard Woolf is repeatedly abandoned by his irritatingly mad, self-obsessed wife, Virginia. We see Julianne Moore's four-year-old son screaming at a window in a trauma-inducing panic when his mother abandons him. Finally, as the gay Aids victim in present-day New York jumps out of the window, the flashback of the child screaming as his mother leaves him is repeated, leaving us in no doubt of the life-long effect of this trauma. Many women in the audience, particularly those who have experienced acute depression, may well recognise something of their own experience in the characters portrayed by Kidman and Moore, but they are likely also to feel intensely confused by the film's deep ambivalence about women - an ambivalence which perhaps tells us more about how men, particularly gay men, feel towards women rather than how women feel about themselves.

Moore has been nominated as Best Actress in Far From Heaven, another film ostensibly about a woman, written and directed by Todd Haynes, a gay man. I loved the film, and was genuinely moved by Moore's delicate performance. She was everything I, as a daughter of a Fifties mother, once believed women should be; a gentle home-maker, always concerned for others, beautiful at all times, even when you are crying. It was only when I grew up that I realised what a horrific straitjacket this image of perfect womanhood was. Which is, of course, one of the themes of Haynes's film. On the other hand, while Haynes gives us a real insight into the plight of gay men in the Fifties - the gay husband is angry, frustrated, libido-driven and real - Moore's character remains sweet, passive and perfectly sexless throughout. I don't buy the argument that Fifties women were like this. Haynes may have set out to tell the true story behind the Fifties veneer of happy families, but instead he lovingly resurrects the icon of the selfless, untouchable mother.

My point is not that men can't tell stories about women. Obviously they can and frequently do. But men's stories about women will naturally have a different slant than the stories women tell about themselves. It's not men, straight or gay, who have the problem, it's women who are not being given enough opportunities to tell their own stories.

If the Oscar nominations are not evidence enough, a recent Hollywood survey found that the number of women directors whose films featured in the list of 250 biggest films was down from 11 per cent in 2000 to six per cent in 2001. The number of women screenwriters also declined from 14 per cent to 10 per cent. This is not just a problem for women wanting to write and direct in the film industry. It is also, crucially, a problem for the masses of women in the audience who are still deprived of seeing their own stories portrayed on screen in a way they can fully identify with as women.